Product and Packaging Innovation

Packaging in prestige beauty is paramount to the consumer’s total experience. The Estée Lauder Companies maintains a top quality package development operation that launches thousands of packages a year for its skin care, makeup, fragrance, and hair care products. We excel at managing complexity — which gives us a competitive advantage when it comes to packaging innovation.

Responsible Practices

For many consumers, packaging is the first introduction to our products. As with everything we do, we maintain a high aesthetic for the design and usability of our packaging, which must conform to our brand standards and meet the expectations of our consumers. We believe that packaging can meet these needs responsibly.

“Our long-standing history of world-class creativity and innovation is central to the high quality products and services our consumers enjoy every day," says Carl Haney, Executive Vice President, Global Research and Development (R&D), Corporate Product Innovation, Package Development. "We are committed to designing and embedding sustainability into our products and packaging and continuing to utilize Green Chemistry principles throughout product development."

As early members of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, we encourage the use of sustainable materials in our packaging and promote responsible production practices. These include:

Green Chemistry

Green Chemistry is a scientific framework that seeks to reduce the negative environmental impacts of chemical products and processes. We support the 12 principles of Green Chemistry and have analyzed our raw materials accordingly for their environmental impacts. The resulting scorecards for each raw material are stored in our green chemistry database.

This data — which is continually updated — is available for use by our brand chemists to select ingredients according to sustainability criteria. The availability of current data and analysis helps us develop new products that are assured to meet or exceed current global standards.

Lifecycle Analysis (LCA)

We utilize lifecycle analysis (LCA) software, which helps us identify environmental impacts associated with packaging materials and design. We expect to continue to leverage LCA tools to make better informed decisions about packaging design, material use and sourcing.

In collaboration with our supplier industry groups, we continue to explore and test the use of more sustainable materials such as plant-derived plastics, new packaging formats including refills and postconsumer recycled content, and we aim to design our packaging for more effective materials recovery.

Packaging Design

The design and aesthetic of our packaging must reflect the prestige of our products. To meet the changing needs of consumers, we are committed to delivering products that perform well for consumers and for the environment. We continue to work on gaining greater understanding of global consumers’ expectations for more sustainable products and related purchase motivations.

We support and encourage our packaging designers and engineers to create sustainable, elegant packaging solutions and to remain current with emerging industry trends.

Plant-based materials

Reducing our dependence on fossil fuel-derived plastic packaging materials is a meaningful way to reduce our overall impact on climate change. We have established relationships with key bio-material suppliers and we are working to better understand the challenges, costs and performances of these materials.

Based on LCA results, plant-based materials are promising as high-performing, environmentally preferable packaging materials. In the coming years, we aim to continue identifying opportunities to substitute with these key renewable materials.

Raw Materials Assessment

Building upon our rigorous internal safety assessments, we work with external partners to assess the human health and environmental safety of the raw materials we procure for our product portfolio. This assessment is used to complete a profile for each new raw material and is an important resource for our formulators.